~ an irreverent look at UK politics

More Brexiter lies: No – the Revoke Art. 50 petition is NOT being faked by Russian bots or fraudsters

According to leading Brexiters, the petition to revoke article 50 (sign here) allows people to sign multiple times, allows non-Brits from abroad to sign it and is being boosted by “armies” of fake Russian bots:

All lies.

The extraordinary success of the petition (over 3 million and still counting at the time of writing) has got panicking Brexit leaders rolling out porkies to their easily hoodwinked supporters to rival those written on the side of a bus.

LIE 1: the petition allows people to sign multiple times.

It is possible to sign the petition multiple times but the signature will only be counted as a genuine signature and added to the petition count once it is verified by email address. And each email address is verified as valid and unique to each signer’s name after the IP address and identity has passed through anti-abuse measures by no less than Google, Microsoft and Apple combined. Here’s an explanation from the ‘Technology in Government’ UK government website on how fraud is detected on government petitions:

LIE 2: the petition allows non-Brits from abroad to sign it.

The petition can be signed from anywhere in the world. Many British citizens live or work abroad, are on holiday or on business trips. That is why there are signatures made from other countries. But still, every signature must be verified as being from a British citizen or legal UK resident, or it will not be counted as a signature.

In any case, at the moment, just 1.4% of signatures on the petition have been from abroad (data thanks to @andyclegg):

LIE 3: the petition is being boosted by armies of fake bots.

Again, every signature has to run a gauntlet of verifications, including from Google, Apple and Microsoft, to ensure it is valid and genuine. This makes it impossible for signatures from fake bots to be included in the signature count. On top of that, mass signings from accounts or geographical locations are also closely monitored. Again, from the gov.uk website:

34 thoughts on “More Brexiter lies: No – the Revoke Art. 50 petition is NOT being faked by Russian bots or fraudsters”

The reason it is continually crashing is the 400 signatures per second which are coming from bots whether they are Russian chinese or other foreign interference is irrelevant it just means the whole thing is nonsense.

Thanks for pulling this all together. Just an fyi – its 3.8% signatures from abroad, 1.4% from rest of EU and 2.4% from rest of world. Wanted to flag it to you so some annoying Brexit “well actually” person didn’t pull a “gotcha” thing. 🙂

It doesn’t surprise me at all, that Brexiteers are trying to discredit the legitimacy of this petition to revoke article 50. They are running scared because they realise that the mood of the majority in the country is to remain in the EU Arch Brexiteers have told unmitigated lies since before the referendum right through to the present day and unfortunately , there are still those gullible enough or so determinedly entrenched in their own bigotry that they want to believe them.
The petition is legitimate. If you value your future and want it to be the best it can be and you want the same for your children and their children, sign the petition to revoke article 50.

If, as has been claimed, the signatures are fraudulent, then it’s quite remarkable that the results so far, when shown in a map, correspond closely with remain voting constituencies across the country. It elevates the sophistication of the “ballot stuffing” required, frankly to a level of significant implausibility.

Individual signatures can be faked, but not millions or even tens of thousands without being detected. Bear in mind that multiple submissions from individual devices are perfectly obvious and trivial to remove. Each one will have details of the device, the operating system, the browser, the IP address and other information. Apart from anything else, the electoral register could allow later verification. Whether the petition data will be shared with MPs or the government, or indeed anyone, is something I haven’t seen any information on. I’d imagine they’d get at least a good idea of how good the data are for their constituency and will know how it compares to the referendum result.

A further difficulty for the conspiracy theorists is that the petition took off after Teresa May’s appalling speech. This was unexpected. Yet, the reaction could not involve sophisticated ballot stuffing with signatures appropriately distributed in the expected pattern by constituency without significant planning and preparation. Perhaps the conspiracy extends to Teresa May being complicit? I wonder if any sane person believes that there’s more to her than what has been obvious?

Frankly, the idea put forward by Nigel Farage that the Russians were involved in rigging the petition is as plausible as the claim by Isabel Oakshotte that his March on London was limited “for security reasons”. How many disappointed prospective participants have we seen complaining they weren’t allowed to join? None. Instead, we’ve seen them attempt to block filming in order to hide their embarrassing, pathetic & dwindling group of suckers.

you spray pollutioη sulphuric acid into the atmosphere to stop “global warmiηg.”

Similar logic is giving heroiη addicts close to death just a bit more heroiη and they’ll be cleaη. If the ordinary man and woman proposed this we would be sectioηed.
The americaη αυδιεηcε laugh and cheer as they are being mocked by this ρsycopaτhic maδman. y outube.com/watch?v=wOfm5xYgiK0

Yep I pointed out that although not impossible to circumvent, any measures that are taken to do so, very quickly show up.

Even with a serious Zombie-bot, with a 10,000 or more trojan actors in the UK, leaves tell tale signs in its operation.

It would literally need a Zombie bot or several with over 1 Million compromised systems in the UK to pull this off. However yet again and it could only be run in very short bursts. Not to flag up its activity.

A Million or so random systems all communicating with very specific IP’s around the world, then they suddenly vote on a petition.

It really is only in the realms of State level Actors, the scale is too large. OK in my day I could have pulled it off, but these guys are not the Original ‘Z3rO CooL’.

Even then it would have been caught out eventually. These days they have considerably more technology to their advantage which can spot unusual trends in net traffic almost instantly.

Online Petition systems are not foolproof, but you are definitely a fool if you listen to these idiots who have no actual knowledge of how the system work, trying to tell you that its been hacked.

It hasn’t been hacked, it hasn’t been compromised, the Junk that did end up on there has been filtered out.

I already Discredited Guido Fawkes over his creative use of the front page of the Data trying to to claim Foriegn Actors. Or put more simply, his lies.

I don’t understand why the Brexiteers are making such a fuss. If they believe that the country by majority vote wishes to leave, then they too can request a government poll asking people to vote for Brexit with a choice on “no deal” , “Mrs. May’s deal” same thing I know, or the deal Corbyn suggested which was backed by so many here and in the EU. The Brexiteers can word it any way they want and wait for the responses to flood in. Course, that would presuppose the Brexiteers are confident in the response they would receive – ahem.

While I agree that the petition is not being faked by Russian bots.
Those large numbers still look too large.
Some constituencies apparently have 35% of all eligible voters having signed – you see turnouts of all voters for an election less than that.
4-5% would be more believable IMO.
The problem is that the petition only seems to be using the fact that an email can be sent to an email address as proof of identity and for detection of duplicate votes.

And it looks like it is possible to sign more than once from the same email!
The petition detects duplicate signatures if it looks like an email is used twice and sends an email to that effect, but only if the email “looks” the same.
It is however possible to enter the same email so it “looks” different by inserting “.” into the name part of the email. By design these are ignored by email services.
e.g. name@mail.com , n.ame@mail.com , n.a.me@mail.com will all go to name@mail.com but the petition page does not see it as a duplicate.
I actually tried this on another petition and it seemed to accept the duplicate votes by sending the confirmation email to the actual email and allowing the confirmation link to be used.

Now some speculation – Tin foil hat stuff?
Obviously not conclusive but the fact that the website crashed at one point due to high traffic could be a symptom of some sort of automated voting.
Without extra checks a malicious email server could be set up to provide spoof emails addresses that look valid and even automate the confirmation response.

‘Realist’ [above at 4:21am 25th March] says <>
This is hardly more than 1 per second. It’s been going up by over 30 a second sometimes in daytime and – as I type – it’s only slowed down to 7 a second even after several days.
‘Realist’ has absolutely no evidence of botting and clearly hasn’t read the article about the various safeguards.
I’m guessing that Realist is one of those Brexit people who confuses what they want to be real with what IS real. Awful lot of it about on the Leave side.

The uk voted to leave the corrupt eu nearly three years ago. Since then there has been an invidious approach to undermine this will of the people. An anti-democratic machine led by war monger bliar and fascist soros amongst others including the eu itself. This petition is yet another example of this. There is no real evidence that people now want to remain in the corrupt and dictatorial eu – rather, more are likely to want to leave